Aspire in the World Fellows Book - 2022

29 28 Second Half André Fornaziero – Aspire Academy Aspire Academy is a complex institution, and we have a unique environment regarding data becausewe’re not only a team, a club, a national teamor a league. We are a mix of all these kinds of organizations, which makes things more challenging and also more complex. For instance, we manage all data from all the academy teams and we manage all the data from the youth and senior national teams. We also manage data from all the clubs in Qatar as well as some European clubs that we have a relationship with. We can track the journey of the player because all his data has been uploaded to the same database enabling us to be data-informed in many decisions we have. The strategy we deliver comparing the U12 to the U23 is the same, what changes is only the players that we are working with. We try to align everything because all of them can turn into a first team player so we cannot distinguish them. An important aspect is data by itself is nothing, it’s just a number. The challenge is to transform data into information, and when we use that information in practice, we create knowledge. This continuum from data to information to knowledge is the way that we are aiming for. What we try to do is to provide not only the data but also its analysis or a benchmark of that data. We try to contextualize his data in order to benchmark this data against many different targets. For example, this player ran 50% of the match, covered what he typically does on this kind of day, or he met the target that we aimed for. By finding the correct comparison with the best visualization, we can present the data alongside its benchmark. Not only the data on its own but by doing this continuum, I think we are closer to having more data-informed decisions. Yannick Euvrard – Royal Belgium Football Association I think the role of data is supportive. It’ll never, for us at least, make the decision. You’ll always try and find things in the video to support the technical staff’s decisions, and you also try and use data to support their decision. Technical staff can come in and ask or tell a player wasn’t that good. Then we go and look at the data and try to agree or disagree on that specific decision. It always has a supportive role rather than the end decision. Our current main project is the RBFA data hub where we try to house all of the information that technical staff require in order to make decisions. We try to house that in one place so that the technical staff have one specific area to go to and find all the information needed. This can go from scouting on an individual level or team-based, to psychology reports, health reports, sleep data, and so on. To communicate the data, we mainly start with a question from the technical staff and then try to build on top of that. In that way, we have the data hub that we’ve created, which is accessible for the technical staff at any point in time. When they ask a question, we try and add that on top of it, and then we go into our teams and try to evolve that dashboard to keep on adding information. So, it’s a natural process of adding information in and if it’s relevant, he’ll come back with another question. If it’s not new he might ask to just delete it but adding that on top and having the information for them available is at this point what we do.